The 6th Annual Frontier Faire at Fort Daniel

Learn About Frontier Life & The Cool Weapons at The Fort Daniel 6th Annual Frontier Faire – Photograph by Robert Coffey

Are you a reenactment fanatic? Or maybe you love archaeology, and want to see how the latest and greatest technology is uncovering secrets from the past? Well coming up next month you can satisfy both needs, and provide a wonderful and educational outing for the kids.

It’s the 6th Annual Frontier Faire on Saturday, September 20th, 2014 at the Fort Daniel site, located at 2505 Braselton Road, Hog Mountain, Georgia. The Fort Daniel Foundation and Gwinnett Archaeological Research Society (a chapter of the Society for Georgia Archaeology SGA) hosts this event every year. This year the theme is the Bicentennial of Peachtree Road, a celebration of the Creek Indian War military road that was built to connect Fort Daniel at Hog Mountain with a new fort at Standing Peachtree that would be known as Fort Peachtree. This fort was crucial to the development and settlement of the area that would become Atlanta.

Wofford Map of the Forts in Georgia in 1792 – The Fort Daniel Foundation

Fort Daniel’s history stretches far back into our past, when military forts were constructed to protect the European settlers that were swarming Native American lands. While nobody is certain when the first Fort Daniel was built, by the early 1800’s a fort existed on the highest part of Hog Mountain in what is now northeastern Gwinnett County.

The Hog Mountain Fort was strategically situated at the south end of the 1785 Treaty of Hopewell (Cherokee lands) and north end of the 1790 Treaty of New York (Creek lands). Because of the deterioration of the fort, a new fort, to be known as Fort Daniel, was built in the fall of 1813, shortly after the full breakout of the Creek Indian War, apparently on the site of the old fort. In early 1814, a U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps officer was sent to Hog Mountain to blaze, with local assistance, a road thru Indian lands from Fort Daniel to the Creek town of Standing Peachtree, where another fort (Fort Peachtree) would be built by Lt. George Gilmer and his detachment from Fort Washington. The road would be known as “Peachtree Road,” (now, Old Peachtree Road), and it is the building of the road that is celebrated in Fort Daniels’ 6th Annual Frontier Faire on September 20th.

The Fort Daniel Frontier Faire – Photograph by Robert Coffey

So mark your calendars for this fun event. There will be live music, food, face painting for the kids, community archaeology, a museum tent with artifacts from the site, a large antique tool display, a blacksmith, educational displays including SGA’s Archaeo-Bus, Native American lithic tools and pottery making demonstrations and even a Native American story teller. Visit the Fort Daniel Foundation website for more information.